Tag: 404

I was wondering what Yahoo would do with the millions of Geocities URLs out there. I thought they might use a 301 redirect for all URLs, but where would they redirect them? Yahoo.com? I mean, Yahoo is a PR9. They could use the link love. 😉 Also, Yahoo needs money. They should have sold the Geocities redirect. I wonder if anyone would have bid on that. Just imagine: You could buy the link authority of the entire Geocities domain. Of course it would be really easy for Google to discount those links, but it would still be interesting to see if someone would have purchased that redirect opportunity.

And don’t forget that even if the links had been discounted, the amount of traffic you would get from that redirect would be huge. I’m thinking affiliates would have bid pretty high for the Geocities redirect. I can see it now: all Geocities traffic is sent to a landing page with 5 banners – Porn, Viagra, Phentermine, Cash Loans & Debt Relief, and Dating. And then another Porn banner just in case someone missed the first one.

After checking some of the Geocities URLs, I have only seen ‘410 Gone’ in the header response. A ‘410 Gone’ response is harsh. It feels so final. Like an annulment. The relationship is over. The URL is gone forever. The ‘410 Gone’ makes a typical 404 sound more like a “maybe-we’ll-work-out-sometime-in-the-future-but-not-now” response. The 410 does not waffle. It’s not Brett Favre. The 410 Gone response is definitive. Game over.